Exotic Meats & Inedible Objects

By Rachel Rodman

Rachel Rodman's collection of odd literary recipes that blend horror, folk tales and humor in wonderfully quirky poetry. Exotic Meats & Inedible Objects is grim and playful, by turns; its pieces have been variously described as "clever and funny," "disturbing and thought-provoking," and "amusing and weird."

You Couldn't Cook It Less

·2 figs, diced
·1 rat's anus, sautéd
Stir with a bow from the world's smallest violin.
Add some other stuff, too–or not. Whatever.

America the Beautiful

·1 bald eagle
·1 big blue ox
·50 amber waves of grain
Encase in an apple pie crust.
Frost with smallpox.

Recipes of this "classic" form are interspersed with works of very short prose, which give a culinary spin to famous stories.

Mid-Diluvian Meatballs

As the water receded from the land, revealing an empty world, Noah descended from the Ark. His stomach bulged, and the deck behind him was littered with bones and gristle.
"You misunderstood," said a Voice from the clouds. It was raw and enraged and tragic, and it reverberated with the irrevocability of the loss. "Those animals were not for eating."

Exotic Meats & Inedible Objects explores many subjects: history, time travel, and ancient myths; art, biology, popular culture, fairy tales, and mathematics. It is funny. It is sad. It is strange and playful and provocative.

What really drives Exotic Meats & Inedible Objects though, is the idiosyncratic conviction that everything is edible. (And, in its own way: delicious.) And that even traditionally inert ingredients, like fallen trees, jars of urine, semicolons, sound waves, nihilism, and so on, can, and should, be chopped, seasoned, baked, frosted, swallowed, digested…

and savored.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Madness Heart Press
• Release date: Feb 14, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393605065

Rachel Rodman

Rachel Rodman’s work has appeared in more than 30 markets, including Analog, Fireside Magazine, and Daily Science Fiction. When not writing, or eating, she hunts down forgotten stories from the history of science and dreams up cross-disciplinary projects that combine science and art.  This is her first collection. 

Book preview

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Exotic Meats

+

Inedible Objects

A Collection of Literary Recipes

Rachel Rodman

To my husband, Nick. And my writers’ group, The Wordos.

Menu

Amuse-Bouche, Amuse-Cerveau

The Edible Grimm 11

The Taste of Music 27

Once Upon a Table 39

Fast Food Opera 53

Nursery Roasts and Fairy Ales 69

An Edible Treasury of Classic Stories 83

Comestibly Ever After 97

Sleeping Beauty in 11 Courses 111

Great Recipes of Western Literature 129

When Rachel first approached Madness Heart Press with her collection, it had a different name that did not catch my eye. Her cover letter, which you can mostly see on the back of this book you are holding in your hands, did. You see, I was working on my own collection of poetry at the time, and I had a professional history as a chef.

"What really drives Exotic Meats & Inedible Objects, though, is the idiosyncratic conviction that everything is edible. (And, in its own way: delicious.) And that even traditionally inert ingredients, like fallen trees, jars of urine, semicolons, sound waves, nihilism, and so on, can, and should, be chopped, seasoned, baked, frosted, swallowed, digested…

and savored."

How could I not be entranced? This collection spoke to me on a bone-deep soul level. It spoke to everything that I loved in poetry and literature. But was it horror? As a horror publisher, was this in my wheelhouse?

Rodman’s use of wordplay and the way she twists meaning and allusion hypnotized me. Her poetry is intensely different than my own, not only in style but in theme. I have long held that good poetry is, in fact, flash fiction, told with a twist, and look at the first poem in the collection:

AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL

·1 bald eagle

·1 big blue ox

·50 amber waves of grain

Encase in an apple pie crust.

Frost with smallpox.

3 ingredients and a crust that speaks to what America wants to think about itself with a

finishing of the dark, hateful truth of origins. This tells a story, this has a twist, this is delightful poetry.

At the end of the day, I realized it didn’t matter that I couldn’t classify this collection in any one genre. I had the power to help Rodman bring this collection to the world, and I would be damned if I didn’t take the opportunity to be a part of Exotic Meats + Inedible Objects.

John Baltisberger

Editor in Chief, Madness Heart Press

Foreword

AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL

·1 bald eagle

·1 big blue ox

·50 amber waves of grain

Encase in an apple pie crust.

Frost with smallpox.

WAKEY, WAKEY

·15 coffee beans

·1 voice box, dissected from the throat of a rooster

·1 something: small and round—and pea-like?—which persistently disturbs your rest, the discomfort of which you have been unable to eliminate—or to mitigate—even with the layering of many additional mattresses, stacked up high. And O, Little Princess, how you have tried...

·17,000 sound waves, penetrating the darkness, emitted from a distant car alarm. Which trigger, in turn, a terrible fear, that, as you slept, you were transported back in time, 20+ years into the past, because, anyway: in 2018, who even has a car alarm, anymore? And, as your heart thumps, you wonder: What now?

·1 g mescaline

Stir briskly.

MODERN ART PASTA

·87 long coils, sculpted from plaster—intended, possibly, to signify spaghetti, or perhaps worms

·1 burning giraffe

·16 plastic soldiers, who twist and twist and twist, insensibly, inside of the same flame

·1 cup of urine. And, just to be clear: This is not a symbol for urine, or an ironical reference to urine; or some clever, synthetic imitation, in the way that you might expect. But, rather, listen—and I really cannot be too explicit on this point: This ingredient is literally just a cup of urine.

Stir, stir, slowly until the profundity of what you are engaged in strikes you—really strikes you—and you must stop, just for a moment, to stare fixedly into the air, and whisper: O, wow.

Assemble a cooking easel, arranged with sauce in three colors: marinara, pesto, and alfredo.

Spatter the three sauces evenly over coils, ashes, and urine. Use bold, consummate flicks of the wrist, as if you are Jackson Pollack.

HOLY MOLY

·1 mole, smoked with incense

·1 mole, whose sins have been washed away

·1 mummified mole, disinterred from the altar of an ancient church, after cohabiting, for eight centuries, with the finger bones of three medieval saints

·1 small family of moles, extracted from hallowed ground: 1 male mole + 1 female mole (just as it was meant to be), and their quadruplet children—four of them, yes, all at once, which their mother—despite a full awareness of the likely hardships—pointedly did not abort.

·7 moles, flooded out, via a great surge of sanctified water, after having made a g’d-mn’d mess of the papal lawn.

Wrap, burrito-like, in the Shroud of Turin.

Heat, by turns, with:

·the all-encompassing warmth of God’s love—there is nothing warmer

·the flames of God’s Hell—there is nothing warmer

LET’S NOT GET COCKY

·12 adult poultry—only females